


Negatives

by holyfant



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-02
Updated: 2012-05-02
Packaged: 2017-11-04 17:29:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/396359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/holyfant/pseuds/holyfant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mirrors. Mirrors that show nothing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Negatives

**Author's Note:**

  * For [heureviolet](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=heureviolet).



**Negatives**

There are times when she seeks out the pools.

It mostly happens when enough time has lapsed for her to have grown vague in her own mind's eye, for her to have forgotten what it was that brought her here. In moments of clarity she realises that the maiden she still sees when she thinks of herself, pale and frail and beautiful, stretching out her hand in the hope of catching the sun in it, has died a death of darkness and wilting. The flower of her youth's beauty, that had seemed so invincible, so timeless, was trampled so easily under immortal feet, and only lives now as a gnarled, bitter, poisonous barb. She no longer is that maiden, she sometimes realises with a shock that is startling, because she does not know who she is, instead; a creature of pale flesh that never seeks out the sun, of hair that slides against her face in caresses that hiss of her own danger in the night, hiding in the darkness, the dampness of where the light does not penetrate.

She never gets to see herself – only the reflection of what she must be in those moments when she pierces men's hearts in a way that is not that unlike the way she did it before. They are all hers in those moments, full of her, focused only on her and on how she draws near. If there is one thing she can still love in this new existence of rock and bone it is how the certainty of their fear congeals into an eternal devotion; they can never get loose from her now, she will always be what they saw last, what they felt last. She is the night that steals their light away, and it is so similar to how it was before, to how they watched her from between their lashes, wanting, wanting, that she always laughs while their skin turns chipped and grey and cold.

But sometimes, when it has been a while and the maiden in her mind's eye is still too strong to be replaced by what she sees reflected in the terror of her army of statues, she seeks out the pools.

They are dank and stagnant; pools that cultivate life without light, without eyes, creatures of habit and long legs and a hatred of the sun. She is one of them now – her punishment for wanting the sun on her was to never see light again, in the sky or in the eyes of someone else, and now she shares these dark waters, that ripple with slow, cold drops that fall from a ceiling that isn't a sky.

She curls her body at the edge of the pools, silent, a slide of limbs that do not remember day, a shiver of hair against her cheek that smells of danger. She never looks into the water, no matter how close she gets. No matter how she trails her finger over the surface, so close until the water seems to be inching upward, attracted to the movement of her hand. No matter how she leans, and catches glimpses of fear, of hair-that-is-not, of something telling her in silent tongues to stop. And she isn't sure why she does not look. It would be fitting, she often thinks; that her own face should be what she sees last, the flash of horror in her eyes at herself, at the shape that she has taken against the backdrop of cold, unforgiving stone, before she becomes eternal herself, immovable like the cave that houses her now. It would be fitting, she often thinks; because she has become all that she wanted to avoid (cold alone deadly dark) and if she were to die, she would still want to do it on her own terms, watching that which she has become be her own downfall. A ray of light, perhaps? A final shared look? Before the darkness overtakes her she wants, in the rare moments of clearness in a world of earth and rock, to have a final flash of light. And since she is all she has left now, all that she can sustain, she knows it will have to come from herself.

Still she does not look, and she knows by that token how far she has fallen from the girl who defied goddesses. The water reflects nothing but the cave overhead. The pathway into the coldness of earth, of death. She wonders, at the times when she sits there, at the whispering waters' edges, if she would freeze into herself, body arched over the water, or if she would fall in; become stone making a stream, making a change in what seems to be so timeless and still. Disturbing the surface until the earth's pull was enough again to stop the upheaval.

Memories turn into stone here like everything else.

*

How it works is thus: silently she regresses, and what goes last will be the memory of how she was in those first moments, just after she changed. For now, she still remembers that time; what will happen when she dies is that she no longer does. With every stilling of a man's flesh underneath her gaze, the growth of rock-that-was-life, a bit more of that memory is chipped off.

Dwelling near the pools she does still remember, for now – remembers how it took her days to dare touching a hand to her face, not sure if what she would feel would still be skin, not sure if there would be anything at all and not just the unimaginable horror of a face lost. Though it felt brittle and cracked under her fingers, it was skin. Still, it took her a few days more to run a hand through her hair for the first time, because it had been speaking to her already – small hisses, that could easily have been dreams, in that point during the night when time seems to be unsure in which direction to go, when she can tell just by the strangeness of the darkness in the cave that Apollo is about to take to his chariot and start his round, bypassing her every time. Running her hand through that living forest of hair-that-is-not, hair-that-is-creature left her with bite marks on her fingers. Small ones; no wounds, just warnings. Her own danger telling her to beware.

And then she remembers that she bashed her head against the side of the cave for a while, trying to see if she could kill it – herself, though she didn't think that then – and when she found she couldn't, it didn't really seem to matter and she went to sit at the entrance of the cave. And she recalls that she wasn't unhappy, not at all, in that moment.

In fact, she remembers, that was the moment when she had the thought that maybe this was exactly where she needed to be.

*

Her sisters found her soon enough; the shared pull of the umbilical cord a point of gravity between them. None of them were ever quite complete, she knows now, without the purpose that the cold rock under her fingers was already becoming. Their purpose: to protect her; her purpose: to take risks. To invite conflict, to invite eyes, and then turn them into stone. When they came, Stheino and Euryale looked past her, because they could not look at her, and that is something Medusa regrets – but they came, and she could look at them when they weren't looking back. It was before she killed the first person to look at her – after that it was a little easier, because even if memory was already congealing, cooling, she could not bear the thought of her sisters growing into that stillness and coldness that was so utterly shocking, the first time.

Stheino and Euryale don't quite understand her preoccupation with the water. They don't understand that it brings her to a death of sorts. They don't understand how there is something that she wants, in that black mirror. They're not mortal, and she had never thought that it would be a frontier of such magnitude, of such breathless impossibility to scale between them.

The fact that she can still die becomes a thing that separates her from her sisters in every way – because it means a different sort of time. She can't imagine her sisters feeling every second like a drop of water flicked against their skin, or feeling like every moment spent is leading up to something, something that is hidden, so far.

*

In time she comes to see that in the light of history, the battle that she has fought with a goddess who would not accept her question for a light in life was inevitable. There is a whimsy to the way the gods live their eternal lives; they stir up things because they fear the stagnation of immortality, and sometimes they seem like children kicking a nest of bees – the stings, the danger all worth it, all worth the giddiness of the initial play. But in time she comes to see that they, too, dance to the silent music of Khaos and Kosmos, the negatives, the twins separated by inverted light. Even the gods do not choose what they do; and they must know this, they must, because if there is one gift that they possess it is the painful ability to see clearly everything that they cannot do, while not seeing all of the things they can. They must know that even they are bent to the wills of things that have no name, and that that is why they fulfill their duties with such cruelties.

It is cruel of Athena to take from Medusa the light. It is cruel to make it the punishment for a crime in which it was the stake, the highest prize. It is also, Medusa comes to see, not only Athena's decision, because every step of the shadowy path she now treads runs upwards, leads to a summit. And after that? She cannot know, she does not see; if she were to see she would find nothing staring back but the hardening face of fear-into-rock. There are patterns that can be felt but not laid bare.

After summits the paths usually descend again. Yet she has a feeling that nothing awaits her but an abyss after she scales the way laid out before her feet.

*

And when Perseus does come, it takes Medusa a moment to catch her breath, as though she has really reached the final step of a lifelong staircase only to find nothing at the top but a sweeping wind, an empty sky.

She can look at him while he cannot look at her; and she does, she does, because he is a shining beacon in her world that is now utterly dark, and she hates him for it and she loves him for it and she wants to devour him, have that light inside of her, have it be a warmth that she can now only remember with the vaguest flicker of recognition. He sparks it again in her, and she wants to rip his head off and see it turn to stone, not quite dead yet, body not quite caught up yet, life (warm red sticky) bounding away without direction.

She wishes, not for the first time but certainly the last, that she had had the courage to look into the pools in her cave, to have kept the honour wholly her own, to have died a death of nothing more than a sigh that stirs a silent surface. (She does not know if she would have, of course. There is no knowing if she would have died; if she would not simply have lived, one breath tumbling over the other, no moment of understanding, no moment of fading. Living with the added burden of feeling so afraid of what the pool had reflected back at her that she would probably have been unable, ever again, to kill – just for fear that what she was would show clearly in the breaking of eyes, the stuttering of breath in a stone breast.)

She did not have the courage and the silent will of Khaos and Kosmos is insistent and pushing and she fights Perseus, because that is what she does now.

He has tricks, which should be unfair – but she has tricks, too, and they are no less unfair. That his trick should grant him the possibility to look at her and not die makes him the only man worthy of it, the only man who deserves to kill her. She will haunt him; she knows it, and for a moment that is almost enough.

She wishes there were time to ask him if she could look into his shield. Tell him that even if that does not kill her he will. But there is no time, and there is no bridge of that kind between them, a bridge over which she can send words that he can receive. There are no words that she can share with him.

She does not see herself. His sword opens up an empty stretch of space between the things that made her her – an abyss after the summit; the neverending fall; the breaking of a surface of black water; a maiden; a sun chariot, sinking between leaves of brown and gold.


End file.
